Anyone know of a way to get a bunch of information for a list of service tags, does Dell have a section on their site for this? I would also be open to any Perl / Python libraries or *nix shell scripts.

What, exactly, do you mean when you ask to "get a bunch of information" from Dell?
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eleven81Sep 22 '09 at 16:05

Warranty end date would be something I'd look for. Ship date would also be nice.
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Evan AndersonSep 22 '09 at 16:49

A quick search gave me lots of people who want to query machines for service tags, but very little about people querying the Dell web site. Spiceworks links the service tag to a driver download page which takes the service tag as an URL argument. Navigating from that page to the "System Configuration" page, in turn, uses that service tag supplied by Spiceworks (though it's no longer in the URL at that point). It looks like you're not just going to find an URL that you can pass the service tag in that will return some HTML you can screen-scrape. A pity, too. That would be handy.
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Evan AndersonSep 22 '09 at 16:52

Add your system in the dell support site, in the section "my Systems". You can handle up to 100 systems.

You have to have an account to Dell site of course.

Unfortunately I don't know about a batch system to do the job, even if you can of course use curl, snoopy or whatever you are familiar with in order to automatically do the login, retrieve the list and parse the results.

I know this is an old post, but I've spent a decent number of hours on this and thought I'd help anyone else that ran into this. Dell's new site is all javascript and I couldn't figure out how to code against it to query service tag data. After sometime I thought of using their mobile site instead (mobile = no javascript) and that worked for me using perl/LWP to pull data down on each service tag. I'm a perl hacker, so someone else may be able to write this a little more cleanly. The below pulls the original system config. The idea is that the first URL 'get' pulls a cookie with the service tag and the second URL get pulls the data you want about the service tag. You can then parse the "$answer" of the second get for the data you are looking for.

The WMI Win32_BaseBoard.SerialNumber class contains this information. Google "wmi serial number" and you'll find several example solutions for getting this data. We use a script at build time to name the box using serial number and other prepended characters as our workstation hostnames, which makes troubleshooting much easier with large numbers of clients.